The all-star Farm Aid benefit concert is planting itself in Hartford again, Sept. 25 at the Xfinity Theatre with an unparallelled lineup of five headlining acts — Willie Nelson & Family, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds and Margo Price — plus Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers, Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, Bettye LaVette, Jamey Johnson, Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real, Allison Russell, Particle Kid, and Ian Mellencamp.
Regular tickets, costing $65 to $305, go on sale Friday, July 23 at 10 a.m. through LiveNation.com.
A small number of pre-sale tickets, for seats in the first 15 rows (at $500 to $2,500, some of which is a tax-deductible contribution) are available July 20 from farmaid.org/festival.
Besides the extraordinary list of performers, the daylong festival also features the Farm Aid’s “HOMEGROWN Village,” with farm-themed activities, educational opportunities and guest speakers and speakers. There’s also “HOMEGROWN Concessions,” serving sustainably produced foods grown on family farms. Those local farmers also cater the food that the musicians eat backstage.
Another element of the festival is an online silent auction running Sept. 25 through Oct. 8, where “rare and unique artist-signed memorabilia items, including guitars and prints,” will be sold to benefit Farm Aid.
A Farm Aid 2021 mobile app will be available in early September to help festivalgoers navigate all the aspects of the festival, including HOMEGROWN Concessions menu, details of farms in the area and a full schedule of events.
Nelson (as well as his wife Annie Nelson), Mellencamp, Matthews, Young and Price all serve on the Farm Aid board of directors. Farm Aid is a year-round enterprise dedicated to helping family farms and educating people about the need for local agriculture.
Margo Price is the first female performer to serve on the Farm Aid board. In a phone interview Monday afternoon, Price told the Courant that this is “the accolade I am most proud of. It’s worth more than any trophy.”
Price’s family lost their farm during the national farm crisis of the mid-1980s that led to the founding of Farm Aid. “My family was never the same after that,” she says. “They suffered a huge loss.” Price has performed at Live Aid concerts since 2016 — the same year she released her landmark album “Midwest Farmer’s Daughter” — and became a board member last year.
Price released a new EP, “Live from the Other Side,” just last week, and spent the COVID lockdown working on two different albums as well as adding her voice to other artists’ recordings.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in the studio” in the last year, Price says, as well as at home with her children, and have “the most successful year I’ve had with my garden.” She lives in a small town outside Nashville, Tennessee, and sees the value of local agriculture firsthand.
“Family farms are doing the lord’s work,” she says. She appreciates how the festival can educate while also raising needed funds for struggling farmers. “I love coming out there, talking to farmers. Everyone is keeping an open mind, an open heart, learning how we can move forward.”
Price says the Farm Aid concert this fall will be “pretty similar” to how it was in Connecticut in 2018. “It’s such a strong format — education, fun and music. It always has the best lineup. You can connect with farmers, doctors and educators. It’s a show everybody wants to be at.”
Farm Aid was founded in 1985, modeled on major musician-driven benefit events such as Band Aid and Live Aid. Farm Aid not only endured but expanded to a year-round resource for family farms.
Farm Aid promotional materials notes that “New England is home to 32,300 farms across six states, with an additional 33,438 farms in New York State. The Northeast is a hotbed for innovative progress in agriculture, including local and regional food systems, organic production, work to advance racial justice in agriculture, and regenerative agriculture methods of the Indigenous Americans who farmed this land first. The Northeast includes some of the top states for new and beginning farmers, as well as female farmers. Challenges of farmers in this region include access to farmland and credit, fair prices (particularly in dairy) and climate change.”
Among the host of issues to be discussed at Farm Aid this year are COVID-19 and racial injustice.
More information about Farm Aid 2021 can be found at the organization’s website, farmaid.org/festival.
Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.
